The Grand Tour

For roughly two centuries, from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth, the education of a well-born European gentleman was widely thought incomplete until he had undertaken the Grand Tour. This extended journey through the Continent, most often culminating in the celebrated cities of Italy, was regarded as the finishing touch upon a young man's schooling, a rite of passage that was meant to transform bookish learning into worldly polish. Accompanied by a tutor, sometimes wryly called a bear-leader, the traveller might be absent from home for a year or more, following an itinerary that had gradually hardened into convention over successive generations. The tour was at once an educational programme, a coveted social credential, and an exercise in conspicuous expenditure that only the affluent could realistically contemplate. To have made it was to belong.

The ostensible purpose of the whole undertaking was cultivation. In Paris the young man acquired the polish of fashionable society and refined the French that was then the common tongue of the European elite; in the cities of Italy he confronted at last the physical remains of classical antiquity and the masterpieces of the Renaissance, subjects he had previously known only through texts and engravings. Immersion in ruins, galleries, and churches was meant to give substance to a gentleman's education and to furnish him with the cultivated references expected in polite conversation back home. Many travellers returned laden with paintings, sculptures, and antiquities acquired abroad, and this voracious appetite did a great deal to stimulate the European art market and to shape the taste of an entire class for generations.

Yet the reality frequently diverged, sometimes sharply, from the improving ideal. Not every young traveller applied himself diligently to the elevated purposes his family had intended. Freed from domestic supervision and equipped with ample funds, some devoted their considerable energies to gambling, drinking, and dalliance rather than to the earnest study of antiquity. Contemporary satirists gleefully mocked the returning tourist who had acquired little beyond affected mannerisms and a thin veneer of fashionable foreign vices. The tutor's authority over his charge was often more nominal than real, and a determined youth could evade instruction with disarming ease. The tour thus produced both genuine connoisseurs of art and idle wastrels, depending very much on individual temperament and circumstance.

The institution declined as the conditions that had long sustained it changed decisively. The upheavals of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era made Continental travel hazardous and often impossible, and the subsequent spread of railways democratised movement, stripping the tour of the exclusivity that had been half its point. What had once been the jealously guarded preserve of a leisured elite gave way to organised tourism increasingly accessible to the prosperous middle classes. Even so, the Grand Tour left an enduring legacy that outlasted it. It fostered a cosmopolitan sensibility among Europe's ruling class, enriched national collections with Continental treasures, and established the notion, still remarkably influential today, that travel itself constitutes a genuine form of education.